GUEST BLOG #1

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Glimpse:Arihant Chawla started this blog as an online journal for young techies, and usually post computer related stuff and sometimes about the plight of education system that we as young Indians face. He says”

I am Arihant Chawla, a resident of Chandigarh. I just passed out High School, and in my gap year I have prepared a bucket list of things to accomplish, a prominent one being starting a blog. So I started writing my blog at My Coding Chronicles

TO BE OR NOT TO BE

I haven’t read a lot of Shakespeare, and in that light the heading of this post may seem highly hypocritical, the truth is that this phrase gets thrown around so much that even established writers like Blyton make it a part their books, and I am just a noob. It’s become a cliché, and well that is what this post is all about.

As a millennial, I feel that we are kind of too engrossed in the world of magical realism, that somewhere along the way the line between magic and realism got blurred and all we are trying to do is disprove these so called clichés and set up, for the lack of a better world, anti-clichés.

Yeah, but it feels that somehow we’ve overdone ourselves and this culture is so up&up, that it seems like the anti-cliché is the new cliché.

Boggled, well let me explain this with an example. So if you’ve gone through that tutorials phase in your school life, which if you live in India I am assuming you have, like coaching classes for the innumerable competitive examinations, you know what I’m talking about

Firstly, these classes suck. Yeah I said it. But more importantly, they have become this hub of disparity between what seems right and what feels right. I feel that this generation is much more goal oriented. And these “tuition classes” fail to help young inspiring minds recognize their goals.Work smart, not hard is the new mantra. And the education system in our country is really a bit outdated. I mean your measure of a person’s knowledge is based on a standardized test of 3-6 hours duration which at best evaluates your mocking skills! Maybe education has lost it’s essence, is outdated, has fulfilled its purpose and needs to be changed with something that matches this generation’s needs and that IS probably why anti-clichés are such a huge thing right now.

A few days back I was reading this bunch of articles about Millennials v/s the Bloomers and what all of them had in common was that the two could be easily distinguished between on the basis of concentration levels, attention spans and multitasking abilities.

And does this really come as a shock that that in this age when all of us were bombarded with technology so early in our life, and so obsessed with instant updates that we are much better at multitasking than at maintaining concentration levels and high attention spans.

This is evolution, in probably the fastest of terms that the human history has ever witnessed, and to put things into perspective an augmented reality just around the corner, and that sheds a peculiarly senile-shaded light on the education system, especially in a country like India.

Why specifically India? Not boasting, but we are a country whose education minister in 20-frigging-14 was an illiterate, whose biggest achievement in life was acting in a shitty 12 year long show in which her husband has a rebirth and an affair, not necessarily in that particular order.

I figure that this is some form of a perversion of the American Dream is basically that anyone can be the president of the United States, no puns, literally anyone, even pussy grabbing blonde man-children. This calls for the Indian dream where even a chaiwala can become the Prime Minister.

Credit where its due, I think that Smriti Irani is a very wise woman but the raw fact remains that the decision to make her the Education Minister wasn’t one in the best light.

Anyhoo, so applying the very basics of garbage in garbage out policy, the lack of good quality modernized education will lead to this vicious circle of trained parrots, if not illiterate donkeys as future leaders, who continue churning out bad policies and so it continues on and on and on and on and on…..till we as a society are so screwed that the next gen will probably curse us as we do the bloomers.

Cassius said to Brutus, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Well, underlings we may be but we sure can change our destiny, our stars, if we are adamant enough to do so, but only if we are.

Perhaps this generation of millennials will muster the strength to force a change. Perhaps we can break this vicious circle. I know no one person can do it. I know I can’t. But I feel like I am doing my bit in spreading awareness and baby steps, though they may be there’s a hope buried deep within the shackles of society that perhaps we can.